Praise and Worship

The music that is listened to by a large minority of americans every sunday, has been causally dismissed by many critics. There is the assumption that this music was designed as a sexual release for the repressed and depressed, and that there is nothing real, nothing intellectual in it's usage. Even mainstream protestants and Catholics dismiss Praise music as something that is beneath them liturgically.

Praise and Worship might be an ecstatic release, seeing the glossolalia, the dancing, the almost orgasmic wailing and singing along, and the exhaustion afterwords would suggest that, but the narrative ensnares more history and desire then simply suburban unrest. Using a variety of lenses, I want to analyse the aesthetics and social politics of pleasure in Praise and Worship.

Beginning with a history of American ecstatics, including Shakers, Aimee Semple McPherson, and the Jesus People movement, moving into a textual analysis of both typical charismatic church music and more severe examples, and extending the discourse to include politics (both elected and not), architecture, recorded music, live music, theology, literature, and sexualities.

The goal then, is to unpack the myriad number of releases, and pleasures that occur when one is praising and worshipping. To treat the ecstasy of the mega-church as not only real and legitimate, but present in the daily lives of people, but also with a rich and difficult historical tradition. Think of it, then, as collecting the ecto-plasm, left by the holy ghost most Sundays.

Bio:

Anthony Easton is a writer from Toronto, Ontario. He has been published in Geez, The Red State Reader, Stylus, and has book chapters in Queer and Catholic, published by Routledge, and the Cultural History of Hair, published by Trunk Books. He is interested in sex, Jesus, and the politics of American spectacle.